Take Me for a Ride Part 38

The primary focus of the bike trip meditations, though, had been on my years with Rama. I had meditated, for instance, on the LSD trips.

During the intense rush of the drug, my acquired knowledge of myself and of the world around me peeled away like layers of an onion.

It was as if I saw the world through the eyes of a child. Hours later, as the effects of the acid began to wear off, it was as if I saw the world through the eyes of a young man whose self-confidence had not yet been shaken. Rama, who observed me during each trip, mostly let me re-form the layers which made up "me" on my own. The next wave of subjects in his chemical experiments would not be as fortunate (see Epilogue).

I meditated during the bike trip on how, over the years, Rama flipped between "caretaker personalities" more frequently and how, starting in 1984, the flipping grew sudden and extreme.

This unnerving phenomenon could be seen in the stages of his LSD trip. Perhaps, inadvertently, he had designed a multi-leveled, persona-flipping program of "sophisticated spirituality" to mask advanced symptoms of schizophrenia.

I meditated on what had happened the night I left the Centre.

When I followed my gut feelings and spoke honestly to Rama and to the inner circle, Rama responded by turning my brother against me.

It did not matter to me, during the meditations on my brother, that Rama's childhood had been difficult. Rama had told me that his father was "power hungry" and "cold" and that his mother was "wacky"

and "liked to take drugs." Nor did it matter that Rama had probably sought to fill the vacuum of his early years with promiscuity, LSD, devotion to a guru, money, expensive cars and property, and consummate power over hundreds of peoples' lives. Nor did it matter that his confusing set of personalities had probably developed from a simultaneous belief that he was a hustler on the one hand, and a living legend and G.o.d incarnate on the other.

Nor did it matter that I wanted to forgive him.

When I meditated on the casual, diabolical way in which he pitted my brother against me, my understanding and forgiveness vanished.

I tensed my gut and wrestled with a primal image.

The water was red. I shuddered. I saw my brother clearly.

He had an open, bleeding heart. I knew how that felt. I saw him treading water. There was no bottom. I knew how that felt too.

A great white shark circled, rising effortlessly from the depths.

I clenched my fists. There was nothing I could do. Dan could not hear me.

I meditated on what had happened later that night, after Rama rooted his divisive legacy in my brother's mind. When Rama pointed his finger at me, I knew that he was trying to intimidate me.

I also knew that he was trying to maintain some semblance of control.

But I feared that he might be a sorcerer. I intentionally visualized sparks and bolts of protective lightning radiating from the bicycle key.

I understood that the colorful explosions were emanating from the world of my imagination. But that did not stop me from *seeing* them.

The scene unfolding before me was, after all, not just another ending to a Castaneda book. It was real. And I needed all the inspiration I could generate.

The meditations during the bicycle journey helped me comprehend and come to terms with an earlier journey. When I was sixteen, I sought fellowship, Truth, and that which lies beneath the "surface" world of reason. I came to believe that I could find these things by studying with a sorcerer in a desert in Mexico, by gazing at an underexposed photograph of a *fully*

enlightened Indian man, and by following the etiquette of a warm, funny, brilliant, persona-flipping man with a Ph.D. in English.

I later looked to Gandhi and to William Shirer for answers.

But as I rode west from Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts, I found a teacher inside myself, and the lessons worked for me.

I learned that it is important not to follow someone blindly, even if he is truly childlike, humble, self-giving, and "Self-Realized"; even if he is a friend; and particularly if he is reluctant to openly admit that he can be seduced by his power over others.

Genuine teachers encourage their students to question them throughout the *entire* apprenticeship, because genuine teachers accept their own imperfect human nature.

I learned that it is important to balance the mystical with the rational. Meditation tends to open the mind to suggestion.

The art of the mystic seems to be, therefore, to know when to let go, be spontaneous, and open up to the universe, and when to gain control, use the power of reason, and protect the body, mind, and soul.

I learned, too, that it is not necessary to focus on a leader, a philosophy, or a technique to contact deep mystical currents.

By facing intense sunlight and storms during the bike trek, I was in direct contact with the ancient, transcendental kingdom of nature.

By observing my thoughts clarify as they projected and pulsed over fields, lakes, and mountains, I drew closer to the land, to the creation.

By wrestling with winds born of colossal power, I was forced to make constant leaps of faith to merely carry on. But now, sitting by the Eskimo dog, I contemplated the awesome blackness of the night.

I was unaware that the bicycle journey itself had been a natural expression of mysticism.

The following day, I ascended the purple peaks of the Continental Divide.

The sky was clear; the wind, calm. A sign indicated that waters to the east flowed toward the Atlantic, and to the west, the Pacific.

It did not indicate that the waters might return and follow a different path. I dismounted the 12-speed. Fragments of Rama's deepest hooks still lurked in my heart. But I was doing better now.

The healing process had begun. Facing the east while walking backwards to the west, I quickly retracted my thumb whenever a vehicle or driver seemed unsuitable or unsafe to take me for a ride.

Epilogue

Hidden between UCSD and the Pacific Ocean were burial grounds, Rama said, that were sacred to Native Americans. Surfers on their way to Black's Beach pa.s.sed through this land of cliffs and ravines.

They pointed to a graceful, white mansion and said, "Heyyy, duuuude, that's Atkinson's place, duuuuuuuuude." Several properties south of the UCSD Chancellor's mansion lay a burned-out car abandoned on a charred foundation. The address seemed to be 951, but in my mind the missing tile was in place: 9514 La Jolla Farms Road, where Rama became "enlightened" and where I moved into darkness.

It was 1988. I parked my Volkswagon Bus at a mall one-and-a-half miles east of campus and walked with Nunatak toward the sea.

I had cut through the not-yet-bulldozed chaparral just east of Interstate-5 many times since returning to UCSD--a twenty-seven year old undergraduate--but now the sun was setting and the air seemed heavy.

Suddenly, I had a sense of where I was going. During the past two years I had dealt with my Rama experiences intellectually. But you can only sit cooly, unmoved and protected on the cap-of-things-that-were for so long before the cap blows and sends you tumbling.

There are many ways to grapple with the enormity of what lies beneath the surface world of reason. I approached 9514 La Jolla Farms Road.

The last time I got near the place had been the year before, with a friend.

"I lived there once with some radical people," I had told her.

"One of them became...enlightened."

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.

"That's where Atkinson lives," I said, pointing away.

Now, as the sun sank in the Pacific, I stood with Nuna on the edge of the property. I took a few steps forward but quickly stopped cold.

I could almost hear Rama saying in his Kermit-the-Frog voice, "Make millions of people happy." I stepped to where my room used to be when suddenly, superimposed over blackened concrete slabs, images appeared. Rama was in the kitchen cooking for a hundred spiritual seekers. Rama was in the meditation room giving a talk beside a larger-than-life photo of an Indian guru. Rama was at the same spot giving a talk beside himself. Rama was in the garage surveying stacks of WOOF! Rama was offering me cookies to cheer me up because I doubted his enlightenment--my *friend's* enlightenment.

Rama was hopping around the house like a kangaroo, and I was right beside him, and we were laughing like children, and at that moment, in the fading light, the cap blew and tears streamed down my face.

Over the next few years, I grappled with conflicting images of Rama.

Sometimes I saw him as a friend. Other times I saw him as a semi-enlightened seeker or as a powerful sorcerer. But the more I researched his past, the more I discovered he was human.

He was born Frederick P. Lenz III on February ninth, 1950, in Mercy Hospital, San Diego. He was raised Catholic in Connecticut where he lived, alternately, with his grandparents, aunt and uncle, and father.

His parents divorced when he was a child. His father remarried, joined a yacht club, and, in 1974, was elected mayor of Stamford.

In 1967 Fred graduated from Rippowam High School. The following description of him appears in the yearbook: "A streak of the unusual-- chasing the beautiful, hiding from the known. Cut-rate philosopher-- monopoly on the side..."

At seventeen, Fred left the east coast and experienced the mushrooming of the psychedelic movement while living in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. It was during the subsequent year, which he spent in prison for selling drugs, that he was handed a promotional brochure for Indian guru Chinmoy k.u.mar Ghose.

Chinmoy, whose path was paved with "peace, light, and bliss,"

had several hundred followers worldwide, including rock musicians John "Mahavishnu" McLaughlin and Carlos "Devadip" Santana.

Fascinated by Eastern philosophy and meditation techniques popularized in the late '60s, Fred returned to the east coast where he studied the art of quieting the mind with Chinmoy.

He also studied English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

While still an undergraduate, he married and divorced a Chinmoy disciple named Pam, built dulcimers in a wood shop in his bas.e.m.e.nt, joined the university debating team, and began hosting free public lectures on meditation.

Chinmoy, who often asked disciples to start "divine enterprises,"

asked this well-spoken, Phi Beta Kappa graduate to start a laundromat.

When Fred chose instead to enroll in a Ph.D. program in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Chinmoy kicked him out of the Centre for roughly one year in an apparent attempt to teach him obedience and humility.

By the time I met Fred several years later, Chinmoy had dubbed him "Atmananda" or "Bliss-of-the-Soul," whereas the State University of New York at Stony Brook, after accepting his dissertation ("The Evolution of Matter and Spirit In The Poetry Of Theodore Roethke"), had bestowed upon him the t.i.tle "Frederick Lenz, Ph.D."